Two more Bibles

First is The Athiest's Bible. Didn't think they needed one? Wrong. For years, atheists have argued that believers need their beliefs written down somewhere - that way they can keep track of all the "non-sense." Bibles, Qurans, etc serve, say the atheists, as a crutch to their faith. What, then, is an Atheist Bible? It appears that atheists also need crutches for their faith. I wouldn't mention it - unseemly to point out the inconsistency, I think - except that there are several of them - bibles, handbooks, readers, etc.

Now, these are not essays showing how reasonable atheism is. Instead, from what I gathered through a quick perusal standing in the aisle of my local Borders, they are snippets pretending to show how idiotic believers are. A kind of "Anti-Faith." Yet, it does take as much faith to believe there is no God. More, actually. Ah well. I won't dwell.

Worse, perhaps, is The Word on the Street. I actually bought a copy because my Sunday School class does not believ it exists. This book claims not to be a translation of the Bible - the disclaimer is needed and accurate. A lot is not included - whole books are elided with just a few sentences. The idea was to present the ideas of many of the more famous passages of the Bible in contemporary English - slang, colloquialisms, plain speech.

I haven't read deeply enough to figure out what problem this version of (parts of) the Bible is supposed to address - there is The Message, Today's English Version, et al. These present the ideas of the Bible in modern, easy to understand English. In "The Word on the Street" instead of "He maketh me to lie down beside still waters," we have something like "He puts on my favorite CDs." I can only see the new reader getting confused by this. "They had CDs back then?" "Why doesn't God put on CDs for me?" etc. The mind boggles.

Next - when is "next"? Not sure - Next I'll be talking Old Testament for a bit. Psalms and Genesis, I suspect. The Robert Alter translation has me in its thrall...